[sph]

Technical off topic: why does NASA like to store and/or share its images in the TIFF format? IIRC, the last time I saw it used was when I had a scanner in the early 2000s. Is there any technical/digital preservation reason?

The wikipedia article for TIFF [1] actually has a "digital preservation" section but just says it's _possible_ to create a TIFF image without proprietary headers or compression technologies, which doesn't sound to be that relevant nor impossible to achieve with other formats.

EDIT: nevermind, this might be the reason: "The inclusion of the SampleFormat tag in TIFF 6.0 allows TIFF files to handle advanced pixel data types, including integer images with more than 8 bits per channel and floating point images. This tag made TIFF 6.0 a viable format for scientific image processing where extended precision is required. An example would be the use of TIFF to store images acquired using scientific CCD cameras that provide up to 16 bits per photosite of intensity resolution."

Is this really only possible with TIFF? Or is it just because it's what they've used in the 90s, and since it's still viable now, they might as well keep using it for consistency?

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TIFF

[SAI_Peregrinus]

TIFF is also used as an interchange format between image editing software. The more modern DNG format is just TIFF with extra metadata specified.